


the final problem has a cheat code

by gladdecease



Category: Birds of Prey (Comic), Elementary (TV)
Genre: Community: fandom_stocking, Gen, POV First Person, Podfic Available, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gladdecease/pseuds/gladdecease
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn't grab my attention until she's already in my building, stealing swipe cards from janitors and wondering under her breath how to get onto limited access floors.  <em>My</em> floors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the final problem has a cheat code

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dahlia_Moon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dahlia_Moon/gifts).



> s-sob this was supposed to be really short  
> and I'm really not as up on my BoP knowledge/Babs voice as I'd like to be  
> but here you go? I hope you like it?

She doesn't grab my attention until she's already in my building, stealing swipe cards from janitors and wondering under her breath how to get onto limited access floors. _My_ floors. Really, for her to have gotten that far that easily, I must be slipping - or she must be really good.

I go over my options in the back of my head as I watch her on the building's CCTV. Batman and Robin are dealing with a gang the Penguin's co-opted, Nightwing's still out with the Titans for another week, and C... Batgirl isn't ready for the kind of work I have in mind. Which leaves me with... oh, perfect.

"Helena?" I ask when the connection goes through. "How do you feel about doing a bit of street clothes work for me?"

She hums noncommittally, as if she doesn't know I know she's pulling on her thinner suit of body armor as we speak. "Depends. When, where, and who?"

"All good questions," I say, letting my attention return to an algorithm I've been running. "Your answers are: now, if possible; Kord Tower; and that I was hoping you could find that out for me." I give a brief description of the woman in question - Asian, likely Chinese, mid-thirties, 5'6" in heels - and expand the limits of that algorithm. If it hasn't found her yet, she must be from somewhere farther away.

"She's in the tower?" Helena starts picking up the pace. I can't help but smile; I'm not someone who needs protecting, and I almost definitely don't need protecting from this woman, but having people - friends - who instinctively want to look out for you is nice. Comforting.

"Don't worry, she hasn't left the mundane floors yet. And I don't think she's a threat." Setting that algorithm aside, I pull up the program that's been tracing this woman's steps. She took a cab to the tower, before which she'd been at a cafe with... oh.

"What's that 'oh' for, O?" Helena wonders, gunning her motorcycle's engine to cover up the whole "talking to air" thing.

"Before she came here, she had lunch with Jim Gordon."

Helena is silent for a brief, understanding moment. "Lunch in a they're buddies way, or in a threatening, blackmail kinda way?"

"I'm not sure yet," I say absently, going back further. This woman had met up with my father at the station, where... I squint at the blurry still. It doesn't look like he knew her at first, but she said something to make recognition light up in his eyes. I let the program take me back further in the day and make a call. "I'm gonna have to put you on hold, Helena," I say just before Dad picks up. If she says anything more than an indignant shout, I don't hear it.

"Gordon," he grunts. Back at work for the evening - where else would he be?

"Hey, dad!"

"Barbara? What are you calling me for at this hour?"

"Nothing much," I say, continuing to follow the woman's path. Another cab - once again paid with cash - this one from... Gotham International? I track her back to the terminal she entered the city from, and quickly hack the manifest. No names stand out, but I do have Dad on the line for a reason. "Just wanted to check up on you."

"Uh- _huh_."

"Really!" I protest with a laugh. There's a dozen secrets I've managed to keep from my father over the years, but this kind of pretense hasn't been one of them. "Are you eating regularly? Healthily? Have you cut down on the cigarettes? ...meet anyone interesting today?"

He sighs, but it's pleased. I can tell. "Yes, no, a bit, and yes, actually."

"Really?" The manifest doesn't have attached pictures, so I have to go through them manually. It's taking more time than I'd like. "Who?"

"Do you remember meeting an associate of mine, when you were a kid, named Tommy Gregson?"

It takes me a moment to recall the man. Tall - at least, tall to me back then - with dark hair. A serious face, but kind eyes. "He was a detective in New York, right?" I recall, and edit my algorithm to focus on New York City and the surrounding fifty miles or so.

"Yeah, he's captain at the 11th precinct now. A friend of his was coming into town, and he told her to look me up."

"Why would he tell her to do that?" A disturbance on one of my screens catches my eye, but it turns out to just be Helena parking. She enters Kord Tower significantly more subtly, heading up to the highest floor not devoted to Birds of Prey work, ready to cut the woman off should she approach. Good. I toggle one of the lights near her, to let her know I'm aware but still can't talk.

"She's a police consultant, a PI on the side. I'm not a huge fan of PIs, but the way I see it, if Tommy Gregson likes her, she must be alright."

A private investigator... I send Helena a text telling her about as much, check in on my algorithm - still nothing, but my systems aren't as familiar with NYC as they are with Gotham, and it's a big place. Lots of people. "So she's here investigating something?"

"So it seems. And yes," Dad says before I can ask, "I warned her that doing PI work in Gotham is risky business, but she assured me that she knew what she was doing. And to be honest, I think I believe her." Someone on his end asks to speak with him, and his tone loses its cheerfulness. "Not that this hasn't been suspiciously nice, Barbara, but I have to go."

"It's fine," I say, noticing alerts popping up on three different screens. "So do I."

"Love you, take care," he says in a rush, and I barely get to return the sentiment before he's off the phone. I switch back over to Helena, who immediately relaxes on the CCTV, knowing just from the return of static that I'm listening in. I don't say anything, though, distracted by my results.

My sort through the manifest has turned up three likely candidates. One I dismiss immediately, as she's a Gotham native on the second half of a round-way trip. Another turns out to be white, traveling with her Chinese-American husband. The last... hm. The last paid for her ticket in cash, which makes her all the more likely to be my mystery woman. But her name... Pythia Shen. False, if my algorithm's alert is anything to go by. The picture attached to "WATSON, JOAN" certainly matches the woman who's been wandering around my building for half an hour. But why pick such a strange name?

Shen turns out to be her mother's maiden name. Not a good choice if she was trying to stay hidden. And Pythia? Pythia as in _the_ Pythia, as in the Oracle of Delphi? That's not a coincidence.

"She knows who she's coming after," I tell Helena, and explain the reference as I watch Dr. Watson finally sneak into the stairwell. She tries to be nonchalant about it, and if she weren't trying to access a floor with electronically locked doors, it could work. But the card she swiped from a janitor downstairs won't work up here, and it only takes Helena a moment to block her downward escape.

Watson looks Helena up and down, short skirt and tall boots and all. "Somehow," she says dryly, "I don't think you're building security."

"Whatever gave you that idea?"

"And I don't think you're Oracle, either," she says, a wrinkle in her brow. "I need to speak to her."

That throws me _and_ Helena for a moment. " _Her_?" Helena scoffs, half a beat too late to be believed. "Oracle's a myth. Maybe a computer program, if that."

"Oracle is a person," Watson says firmly, "and I need to speak to her."

After a moment of panic and a shorter moment of consideration, I give in to my curiosity. The electronic lock deactivates with a dull clunk, and Watson only hesitates for the briefest moment before rushing through, Helena a cloud of frustration at her heels. I only light the hallways that will lead to me, which Watson picks up on after a minute of fumbling around in the dark. She's at my door in under a minute, out of breath and either desperate or excited. Maybe both.

I let the active teams know I'm going AFK, wheel over to my single off-network computer, and unlock the last door. Joan Watson steps into an empty room and looks disappointed. Then Helena shuts the door behind her, and she reaches for her bag, looking nervous.

"Joan Watson," I say with an air of mystery. It's kind of lost on Watson, fed through the voice alteration program I use, but I enjoy it.

"You must be Oracle," she says, slightly relieved. "I've been looking for you."

"I noticed. The false name on your plane ticket was a nice touch."

Her eyes drift to one side as she remembers something... something painful, if psychology is right about directionality of sight and thought processes. "A friend suggested it, a long time ago." She turns her attention back to me - well, to the Oracle icon on the wall. "A mutual friend, as it happens."

"Oh?"

She pulls a file folder out of her purse and lifts out a photo, holding it up to the pinhole camera in the wall. I'm a little impressed; I hadn't thought she would notice that. The photo is of a man I don't recognize. He's got a long face, dark hair and the kind of stubble that's hard to be rid of without waxing or twice-daily shaving. Kind eyes; they seem to be a theme with this group.

"You would have known him online, under a pseudonym. You were rollingthunder, he was thededucer...?"

"thededucer." It takes me a moment to connect the name with a chatroom, a kid who liked to lecture everybody else about how wrong they were and how much smarter he was than them. The first time he inched towards a topic I knew better than the back of my hand, I served him a smackdown so hard he lurked for a month. After that he was more deferential, at least to me, but he'd still lecture people who were wrong. (To be honest, it was hard for me to resist doing the same. I just had better impulse control.) He'd annoyed me, but I still liked him. He disappeared from the net a few years ago, and I'd missed his snark more than I would've expected. "I remember. And to you, he is...?"

Her expression falls, ever so slightly. " _Was_. Sherlock Holmes. A consulting detective, my partner, and a... very close friend."

Dead, then. And important to her. She flips to the next photo before I can get a "sorry for your loss" out. "And who is this?" A blonde woman, elegant features but a disdainful expression. She's wearing a prison uniform in the picture; I would assume it was her intake photo, but the identifying information she should be holding in such a picture is absent.

"Jamie Moriarty," Watson says, voice going cold. "A criminal mastermind. The love of Sherlock's life, and the woman who killed him. Or," she says, shaking her head, "the woman he died stopping, the sequence of events aren't really clear."

Pulling up a search on the two names on one of my networked computers, I stare at Watson and attempt to summarize. "Your friend is dead. Your enemy is dead. What about any of that makes you come to me?" She looks away, reluctant to respond, and an idea pops into my head. "You don't really think they're dead."

"Moriarty is definitely dead," Watson says firmly. "I did the autopsy myself. Sherlock, though..." She shakes her head. "I don't know. Bodies fall in the Hudson and are never recovered all the time, but this feels different."

"What about that makes you come to me?" I repeat.

"Sherlock taught me everything he knew. Not just about being a detective, _anything_ he thought might be important or relevant, even the smallest thing. That includes going off the grid, to hide and stay hidden. It's not easy. The two of us have found a lot of people who were trying to hide out like that, and to my knowledge Sherlock has never done it before. But he's a very fast learner, so I knew if I wanted to find him - if I wanted to be sure that if I _didn't_ find him, it was because he really was... I knew I would need the best." She fidgets with her purse. "He'd mentioned Oracle before, and I found notes in his files referencing rollingthunder and Oracle both, and as far as I can tell there's no one better than you at finding people who don't want to be found."

Helena chuckles. "She's right about that, at least," she says to me.

I shrug, faux-modest. "I do alright."

Watson looks between Helena and the Oracle icon, hopeful. "So... you'll help?"

In the middle of skimming the police reports on the suspicious deaths of HOLMES, SHERLOCK and MORIARTY, JAMIE, I don't respond right away. It's definitely strange circumstances, and Moriarty's apparent sphere of influence is wide enough that she should have grabbed my attention years ago. That alone would make me want to look into her death, but I can't deny there's a part of me that is still staring at a chatroom profile, worrying about a cyberfriend who's been offline for too long. Not to mention the woman right in front of me, who took unrelated information about an old screenname and a new identity and found a connection where there shouldn't have been any.

 _That_ interests me too, if only for self-preservation reasons.

"I'll help you," I say at last. "But next time you want to find me, just send an email to oracle.com. It'll find its way to me."

Watson sighs, relief sagging at her shoulders and making a hand fly up to her chest. "Thank you, you have _no_ idea how grateful I am - "

"Yeah, yeah," Helena says brusquely, nudging Watson back out the door. "Let's get you out of here, Oracle needs to work." The two of them leave, and I return to my primary computers, answering questions of where I'd been with quips and distracting comments. Joan Watson is going to be a private project, I've decided. No need to involve anyone else.

On that note... "You can leave her whenever, Helena," I say. "I know you probably had bigger plans for today than babysitting, and it's pretty clear that she's not a threat."

On screen, Helena grins, says her goodbyes to Watson, and races back to her motorcycle. She takes off with a screech of tire on pavement and a thrilled laugh, and after that I leave her be. (Contrary to popular belief, I don't play Big Brother to my teammates all the time. ...just when it's important that I know what they're up to.) I return my attention to Watson, to find her back on the first floor, smiling up at one of the security cameras for the building.

"By the way," she says quietly, exaggerating her words so I can read her lips, "you might want to change your modulation program a little, make your voice sound less like your father's." With that, she turns on her heel and leaves.

I remember to close my mouth in a minute or so, at which point my shock has turned into delight. Joan Watson is going to make for a _very_ interesting project.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [the final problem has a cheat code [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6634402) by [blackglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackglass/pseuds/blackglass)




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